Gary Becker
Quotes From
“Competition and Democracy” (1958)
- An electorate with a limited amount of political information finds it easier to place one person in charge of many activities than to choose one person for each activity.#
- It may be preferable not to regulate economic monopolies and to suffer their bad effects, rather than to regulate them and suffer the effects of political imprfections.#
“Comments on Competition, Monopoly, and the Pursuit of Money” (1962)
- Controls placed on the money incomes that can be received by discriminators, such as the income tax, reduce the cost of discrimination below the difference in wages and thus encourage discrimination; controls placed on the wage difference, such as equal pay for equal work legislation, directly reduce the cost of discrimination and encourage discrimination.#
Posts About
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Inside and Outside Perspectives on Institutions: An Economic Theory of the Noble Lie
If there exist no incentive or selective mechanisms that make cooperation in large groups incentive-compatible under realistic circumstances, functional social institutions will require a divergence between subjective preferences and objective payoffs – a “noble lie”. This implies the existence of irreducible and irreconcilable “inside” and “outside” perspectives on social institutions; . . . -
Intellectual Property and Institutional Efficiency: The Limits of the Demsetz Story
Harold Demsetz (1967) in his classic paper “Toward a Theory of Property Rights” makes the case that property rights arise endogenously when the cost of the commons problem begins to exceed the cost of exclusion, and illustrates with the case of Native American tribes and land rights. Once buffalo become . . . -
What Makes Economics a Human Science? Zoöpraxeology and the Abstractive Foundation of Catallactics
Mises stresses both the purely formal character of praxeology, and the uniqueness of man set apart from animals by goal-directed action. To the extent the former is true, however, the latter becomes less unique to man, and we may usefully interpret animal behavior this way. This suggests that the study . . . -
A Note on the Microeconomics of Time Preference
Time preference is not a sui generis component of the rational choice model. In fact, the preference for present goods over future goods masks two quite different phenomena. This being the case, you don’t need behaviorism to see why we’re more willing to bring goods into the present than to . . .